Written by
Emily Dickinson |
Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
|
Written by
William Butler Yeats |
Epilogue to "A Vision'
MIDNIGHT has come, and the great Christ Church Bell
And may a lesser bell sound through the room;
And it is All Souls' Night,
And two long glasses brimmed with muscatel
Bubble upon the table. A ghost may come;
For it is a ghost's right,
His element is so fine
Being sharpened by his death,
To drink from the wine-breath
While our gross palates drink from the whole wine.
I need some mind that, if the cannon sound
From every quarter of the world, can stay
Wound in mind's pondering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound;
Because I have a marvellous thing to say,
A certain marvellous thing
None but the living mock,
Though not for sober ear;
It may be all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Horton's the first I call. He loved strange thought
And knew that sweet extremity of pride
That's called platonic love,
And that to such a pitch of passion wrought
Nothing could bring him, when his lady died,
Anodyne for his love.
Words were but wasted breath;
One dear hope had he:
The inclemency
Of that or the next winter would be death.
Two thoughts were so mixed up I could not tell
Whether of her or God he thought the most,
But think that his mind's eye,
When upward turned, on one sole image fell;
And that a slight companionable ghost,
Wild with divinity,
Had so lit up the whole
Immense miraculous house
The Bible promised us,
It seemed a gold-fish swimming in a bowl.
On Florence Emery I call the next,
Who finding the first wrinkles on a face
Admired and beautiful,
And knowing that the future would be vexed
With 'minished beauty, multiplied commonplace,
preferred to teach a school
Away from neighbour or friend,
Among dark skins, and there
permit foul years to wear
Hidden from eyesight to the unnoticed end.
Before that end much had she ravelled out
From a discourse in figurative speech
By some learned Indian
On the soul's journey. How it is whirled about,
Wherever the orbit of the moon can reach,
Until it plunge into the sun;
And there, free and yet fast,
Being both Chance and Choice,
Forget its broken toys
And sink into its own delight at last.
And I call up MacGregor from the grave,
For in my first hard springtime we were friends.
Although of late estranged.
I thought him half a lunatic, half knave,
And told him so, but friendship never ends;
And what if mind seem changed,
And it seem changed with the mind,
When thoughts rise up unbid
On generous things that he did
And I grow half contented to be blind!
He had much industry at setting out,
Much boisterous courage, before loneliness
Had driven him crazed;
For meditations upon unknown thought
Make human intercourse grow less and less;
They are neither paid nor praised.
but he d object to the host,
The glass because my glass;
A ghost-lover he was
And may have grown more arrogant being a ghost.
But names are nothing. What matter who it be,
So that his elements have grown so fine
The fume of muscatel
Can give his sharpened palate ecstasy
No living man can drink from the whole wine.
I have mummy truths to tell
Whereat the living mock,
Though not for sober ear,
For maybe all that hear
Should laugh and weep an hour upon the clock.
Such thought -- such thought have I that hold it tight
Till meditation master all its parts,
Nothing can stay my glance
Until that glance run in the world's despite
To where the damned have howled away their hearts,
And where the blessed dance;
Such thought, that in it bound
I need no other thing,
Wound in mind's wandering
As mummies in the mummy-cloth are wound.
Oxford, Autumn 1920
|
Written by
D. H. Lawrence |
I thought he was dumb, said he was dumb,
Yet I've heard him cry.
First faint scream,
Out of life's unfathomable dawn,
Far off, so far, like a madness, under the horizon's dawning rim,
Far, far off, far scream.
Tortoise in extremis.
Why were we crucified into sex?
Why were we not left rounded off, and finished in ourselves,
As we began,
As he certainly began, so perfectly alone?
A far, was-it-audible scream,
Or did it sound on the plasm direct?
Worse than the cry of the new-born,
A scream,
A yell,
A shout,
A paean,
A death-agony,
A birth-cry,
A submission,
All tiny, tiny, far away, reptile under the first dawn.
War-cry, triumph, acute-delight, death-scream reptilian,
Why was the veil torn?
The silken shriek of the soul's torn membrane?
The male soul's membrane
Torn with a shriek half music, half horror.
Crucifixion.
Male tortoise, cleaving behind the hovel-wall of that dense female,
Mounted and tense, spread-eagle, out-reaching out of the shell
In tortoise-nakedness,
Long neck, and long vulnerable limbs extruded, spreadeagle over her house-roof,
And the deep, secret, all-penetrating tail curved beneath her walls,
Reaching and gripping tense, more reaching anguish in uttermost tension
Till suddenly, in the spasm of coition, tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!
Opening its clenched face from his outstretched neck
And giving that fragile yell, that scream,
Super-audible,
From his pink, cleft, old-man's mouth,
Giving up the ghost,
Or screaming in Pentecost, receiving the ghost.
His scream, and his moment's subsidence,
The moment of eternal silence,
Yet unreleased, and after the moment, the sudden, startling jerk of coition, and at once
The inexpressible faint yell --
And so on, till the last plasm of my body was melted back
To the primeval rudiments of life, and the secret.
So he tups, and screams
Time after time that frail, torn scream
After each jerk, the longish interval,
The tortoise eternity,
Age-long, reptilian persistence,
Heart-throb, slow heart-throb, persistent for the next spasm.
I remember, when I was a boy,
I heard the scream of a frog, which was caught with his foot in the mouth of an up-starting snake;
I remember when I first heard bull-frogs break into sound in the spring;
I remember hearing a wild goose out of the throat of night
Cry loudly, beyond the lake of waters;
I remember the first time, out of a bush in the darkness, a nightingale's piercing cries and gurgles startled the depths of my soul;
I remember the scream of a rabbit as I went through a wood at midnight;
I remember the heifer in her heat, blorting and blorting through the hours, persistent and irrepressible,
I remember my first terror hearing the howl of weird, amorous cats;
I remember the scream of a terrified, injured horse, the sheet-lightning,
And running away from the sound of a woman in labour, something like an owl whooing,
And listening inwardly to the first bleat of a lamb,
The first wail of an infant,
And my mother singing to herself,
And the first tenor singing of the passionate throat of a young collier, who has long since drunk himself to death,
The first elements of foreign speech
On wild dark lips.
And more than all these,
And less than all these,
This last,
Strange, faint coition yell
Of the male tortoise at extremity,
Tiny from under the very edge of the farthest far-off horizon of life.
The cross,
The wheel on which our silence first is broken,
Sex, which breaks up our integrity, our single inviolability, our deep silence,
Tearing a cry from us.
Sex, which breaks us into voice, sets us calling across the deeps, calling, calling for the complement,
Singing, and calling, and singing again, being answered, having found.
Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.
|
Written by
George Herbert |
If as a flower doth spread and die,
Thou wouldst extend me to some good,
Before I were by frost's extremity
Nipt in the bud;
The sweetness and the praise were thine;
But the extension and the room,
Which in thy garland I should fill, were mine
At thy great doom.
For as thou dost impart thy grace,
The greater shall our glory be.
The measure of our joys is in this place,
The stuff with thee.
Let me not languish then, and spend
A life as barren to thy praise,
As is the dust, to which that life doth tend,
But with delays.
All things are busy; only I
Neither bring honey with the bees,
Nor flowers to make that, nor the husbandry
To water these.
I am no link of thy great chain,
But all my company is a weed.
Lord place me in thy consort; give one strain
To my poor reed.
|
Written by
Donald Hall |
In the mid August, in the second year
of my First Polar Expedition, the snow and ice of winter
almost upon us, Kantiuk and I
attempted to dash the sledge
along Crispin Bay, searching again for relics
of the Frankline Expedition. Now a storm blew,
and we turned back, and we struggled slowly
in snow, lest we depart land and venture onto ice
from which a sudden fog and thaw
would abandon us to the Providence
of the sea.
Near nightfall I thought I heard snarling behind us.
Kantiuk told me that two wolves, lean as the bones of a wrecked ship,
had followed us the last hour, and snapped their teeth
as if already feasting.
I carried the one cartridge only
in my riffle, since, approaching the second winter,
we rationed stores.
As it turned dark,
we could push no further, and made
camp in a corner of ice hummocks,
and the wolves stopped also, growling
just past the limits of vision,
coming closer, until I could hear
the click of their feet on ice. Kantiuk laughed
and remarked that the wolves appeared to be most hungry.
I raised my rifle, prepared to shoot the first that
ventured close, hoping
to frighten the other.
Kantiuk struck my rifle down and said again
that the wolves were hungry, and laughed.
I feared that my old companion
was mad, here in the storm, among ice-hummocks,
stalked by wolves. Now Kantiuk searched
in his pack, and extracted
two knives--turnoks, the Innuits called them--
which by great labor were sharpened, on both sides,
to the sharpness like the edge of a barber's razor,
and approached our dogs
and plunged both knives
into the body of our youngest dog
who had limped all day.
I remember that I consider turning my rifle on Kantiuk
as he approached, then passed me,
carrying knives red with the gore of our dog--
who had yowled, moaned, and now lay
expired, surrounded
by curious cousins and uncles, possibly
hungry--and he trusted the knives
handle-down in the snow.
Immediately after he left the knives, the vague, gray
shape of wolves
turned solid, out of the darkness and the snow, and set ravenously
to licking blood from the honed steel.
the double-edge of the knives
so lacerated the tongues of the starved beasts
that their own blood poured
copiously forth
to replenish the dog's blood, and they ate
more furiously than before, while Knatiuk laughed,
and held his sides
laughing.
And I laughed also, perhaps in relief that Providence had delivered us
yet again, or perhaps--under conditions of extremity--
far from Connecticut--finding there creatures
acutely ridiculous, so avid
to swallow their own blood. First one, and then the other collapsed, dying,
bloodless in the snow black with their own blood,
and Kantiuk retrieved
his turnoks, and hacked lean meat
from the thigh of the larger wolf, which we ate
grateful, blessing the Creator, for we were hungry.
|
Written by
Emily Dickinson |
I got so I could take his name --
Without -- Tremendous gain --
That Stop-sensation -- on my Soul --
And Thunder -- in the Room --
I got so I could walk across
That Angle in the floor,
Where he turned so, and I turned -- how --
And all our Sinew tore --
I got so I could stir the Box --
In which his letters grew
Without that forcing, in my breath --
As Staples -- driven through --
Could dimly recollect a Grace --
I think, they call it "God" --
Renowned to ease Extremity --
When Formula, had failed --
And shape my Hands --
Petition's way,
Tho' ignorant of a word
That Ordination -- utters --
My Business, with the Cloud,
If any Power behind it, be,
Not subject to Despair --
It care, in some remoter way,
For so minute affair
As Misery --
Itself, too vast, for interrupting -- more --
|
Written by
Amy Clampitt |
Like the foghorn that's all lung,
the wind chime that's all percussion,
like the wind itself, that's merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?—
much less whether a bird's call
means anything in
particular, or at all.
Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer's gibbering
Thespesiae iache:
those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.
|
Written by
Sir Thomas Wyatt |
Mine own John Poynz, since ye delight to know
The cause why that homeward I me draw,
And flee the press of courts, whereso they go,
Rather than to live thrall under the awe
Of lordly looks, wrappèd within my cloak,
To will and lust learning to set a law:
It is not for because I scorn or mock
The power of them, to whom fortune hath lent
Charge over us, of right, to strike the stroke.
But true it is that I have always meant
Less to esteem them than the common sort,
Of outward things that judge in their intent
Without regard what doth inward resort.
I grant sometime that of glory the fire
Doth twyche my heart. Me list not to report
Blame by honour, and honour to desire.
But how may I this honour now attain,
That cannot dye the colour black a liar?
My Poynz, I cannot from me tune to feign,
To cloak the truth for praise without desert
Of them that list all vice for to retain.
I cannot honour them that sets their part
With Venus and Bacchus all their life long;
Nor hold my peace of them although I smart.
I cannot crouch nor kneel to do so great a wrong,
To worship them, like God on earth alone,
That are as wolves these sely lambs among.
I cannot with my word complain and moan,
And suffer nought, nor smart without complaint,
Nor turn the word that from my mouth is gone.
I cannot speak and look like a saint,
Use willes for wit, and make deceit a pleasure,
And call craft counsel, for profit still to paint.
I cannot wrest the law to fill the coffer
With innocent blood to feed myself fat,
And do most hurt where most help I offer.
I am not he that can allow the state
Of him Caesar, and damn Cato to die,
That with his death did scape out of the gate
From Caesar's hands (if Livy do not lie)
And would not live where liberty was lost;
So did his heart the common weal apply.
I am not he such eloquence to boast
To make the crow singing as the swan;
Nor call the liond of cowardes beasts the most
That cannot take a mouse as the cat can;
And he that dieth for hunger of the gold
Call him Alexander; and say that Pan
Passeth Apollo in music many fold;
Praise Sir Thopias for a noble tale,
And scorn the story that the Knight told;
Praise him for counsel that is drunk of ale;
Grin when he laugheth that beareth all the sway,
Frown when he frowneth and groan when is pale;
On others' lust to hang both night and day:
None of these points would ever frame in me.
My wit is nought--I cannot learn the way.
And much the less of things that greater be,
That asken help of colours of device
To join the mean with each extremity,
With the nearest virtue to cloak alway the vice;
And as to purpose, likewise it shall fall
To press the virtue that it may not rise;
As drunkenness good fellowship to call;
The friendly foe with his double face
Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal;
And say that favel hath a goodly grace
In eloquence; and cruelty to name
Zeal of justice and change in time and place;
And he that suffer'th offence without blame
Call him pitiful; and him true and plain
That raileth reckless to every man's shame.
Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;
The lecher a lover; and tyranny
To be the right of a prince's reign.
I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!
This is the cause that I could never yet
Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,
A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.
This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,
And in foul weather at my book to sit;
In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;
No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:
In lusty leas at liberty I walk.
And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,
Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.
No force for that, for it is ordered so,
That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.
I am not now in France to judge the wine,
With saffry sauce the delicates to feel;
Nor yet in Spain, where one must him incline
Rather than to be, outwardly to seem:
I meddle not with wits that be so fine.
Nor Flanders' cheer letteth not my sight to deem
Of black and white; nor taketh my wit away
With beastliness; they beasts do so esteem.
Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey
For money, poison, and treason at Rome--
A common practice used night and day:
But here I am in Kent and Christendom
Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;
Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come,
Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.
|
Written by
Emile Verhaeren |
In the garden yonder of yews and death,
There sojourneth
A man who toils, and has toiled for aye.
Digging the dried-up ground all day.
Some willows, surviving their own dead selves.
Weep there around him as he delves.
And a few poor flowers, disconsolate
Because the tempest and wind and wet
Vex them with ceaseless scourge and fret.
The ground is nothing but pits and cones,
Deep graves in every corner yawn;
The frost in the winter cracks the stones,
And when the summer in June is born
One hears, 'mid the silence that pants for breath,
The germinating and life of Death
Below, among the lifeless bones.
Since ages longer than he can know,
The grave-digger brings his human woe,
That never wears out, and lays its head
Slowly down in that earthy bed.
By all the surrounding roads, each day
They come towards him, the coffins white,
They come in processions infinite;
They come from the distances far away.
From corners obscure and out-of-the-way.
From the heart of the towns—and the wide-spreading
plain.
The limitless plain, swallows up their track;
They come with their escort of people in black.
At every hour, till the day doth wane;
And at early dawn the long trains forlorn
Begin again.
The grave-digger hears far off the knell,
Beneath weary skies, of the passing bell,
Since ages longer than he can tell.
Some grief of his each coffin carrieth—
His wild desires toward evenings dark with death
Are here: his mournings for he knows not what:
Here are his tears, for ever on this spot
Motionless in their shrouds: his memories.
With gaze worn-out from travelling through the years
So far, to bid him call to mind the fears
Of which their souls are dying—and with these
Lies side by side
The shattered body of his broken pride.
His heroism, to which nought replied,
Is here all unavailing;
His courage, 'neath its heavy armour failing.
And his poor valour, gashed upon the brow.
Silent, and crumbling in corruption now.
The grave-digger watches them come into sight,
The long, slow roads.
Marching towards him, with all their loads
Of coffins white.
Here are his keenest thoughts, that one by one
His lukewarm soul hath tainted and undone;
And his white loves of simple days of yore,
in lewd and tempting mirrors sullied o'er;
The proud, mute vows that to himself he made
Are here—for he hath scored and cancelled them,
As one may cut and notch a diadem;
And here, inert and prone, his will is laid,
Whose gestures flashed like lightning keen before.
But that he now can raise in strength no more.
The grave-digger digs to the sound of the knell
'Mid the yews and the deaths in yonder dell.
Since ages longer than he can tell.
Here is his dream—born in the radiant glow.
Of joy and young oblivion, long ago—
That in black fields of science he let go,
That he hath clothed with flame and embers bright,
—Red wings plucked off from Folly in her flight—
That he hath launched toward inaccessible
Spaces afar, toward the distance there,
The golden conquest of the Impossible,
And that the limitless, refractory sky,
Sends back to him again, or it has ere
So much as touched the immobile mystery.
The grave-digger turneth it round and round—
With arms by toil so weary made,
With arms so thin, and strokes of spade—
Since what long times?—the dried-up ground.
Here, for his anguish and remorse, there throng
Pardons denied to creatures in the wrong;
And here, the tears, the prayers, the silent cries,
He would not list to in his brothers' eyes.
The insults to the gentle, and the jeer
What time the humble bent their knees, are here;
Gloomy denials, and a bitter store
Of arid sarcasms, oft poured out before
Devotedness that in the shadow stands
With outstretched hands.
The grave-digger, weary, yet eager as well.
Hiding his pain to the sound of the knell,
With strokes of the spade turns round and round
The weary sods of the dried-up ground.
Then—fear-struck dallyings with suicide;
Delays, that conquer hours that would decide:
Again—the terrors of dark crime and sin
Furtively felt with frenzied fingers thin:
The fierce craze and the fervent rage to be
The man who lives of the extremity
Of his own fear:
And then, too, doubt immense and wild affright.
And madness, with its eyes of marble white,
These all are here.
His head a prey to the dull knell's sound,
In terror the grave-digger turns the ground
With strokes of the spade, and doth ceaseless cast
The dried-up earth upon his past.
The slain days, and the present, he doth see,
Quelling each quivering thrill of life to be.
And drop by drop, through fists whose fingers start.
Pressing the future blood of his red heart;
Chewing with teeth that grind and crush, each part
Of that his future's body, limb by limb,
Till there is but a carcase left to him;
And shewing him, in coffins prisoned,
Or ever they be born, his longings dead.
The grave-digger yonder doth hear the knell,
More heavy yet, of the passing bell.
That up through the mourning horizons doth swell
What if the bells, with their haunting swing,
Would stop on a day that heart-breaking ring!
And the endless procession of corse after corse.
Choke the highways no more of his long remorse
But the biers, with the prayers and the tears,
Immensely yet follow the biers;
They halt by crucifix now, and by shrine,
Then take up once more their mournful line;
On the backs of men, upon trestles borne.
They follow their uniform march forlorn;
Skirting each field and each garden-wall.
Passing beneath the sign-posts tall,
Skirting along by the vast Unknown,
Where terror points horns from the corner-stone.
The old man, broken and propless quite.
Watches them still from the infinite
Coming towards him—and hath beside
Nothing to do, but in earth to hide
His multiple death, thus bit by bit,
And, with fingers irresolute, plant on it
Crosses so hastily, day by day,
Since what long times—he cannot say.
|
Written by
Michael Drayton |
An evil spirit, your beauty, haunts me still,
Wherewith, alas, I have been long possess'd,
Which ceaseth not to tempt me to each ill,
Nor gives me once but one poor minute's rest.
In me it speaks, whether I sleep or wake;
And when by means to drive it out I try,
With greater torments then it me doth take,
And tortures me in most extremity.
Before my face it lays down my despairs,
And hastes me on unto a sudden death;
Now tempting me to drown myself in tears,
And then in sighing to give up my breath.
Thus am I still provok'd to every evil
By this good-wicked spirit, sweet angel-devil.
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